Bob Galen’s STPCon session, entitled “Agile Testing within SCRUM”, had an interesting twist I did not expect. After a Scrum primer, Bob suggested that test teams can use a Scrum wrapper around their test activities, regardless of what the dev methodology may be.

In other words, even if you’re testing for one or more non-Scrum dev teams, you may still use Scrum to be a better test team. This is kind of a fun idea because I’ve been chomping at the bit to be part of a Scrum team. The idea is that your QA team hold the daily stand-up meetings, create a sprint backlog list, track sprint progress with a burndown chart, and end each sprint with a review meeting to reflect on sprint success/failure. You can add as many Scrum practices as you find valuable (e.g., invite project stateholders like devs/customers to prioritize sprint backlog items or attend daily meetings).

Wrapping QA practices with Scrum is actually not that difficult. For example, sprint backlog items can be bugs to retest, features to test, or test cases to write. Daily stand-up reports can be “Yesterday I tested 5 features and logged 16 bugs, today I will test these other features, and Bug13346 is blocking me from executing several tests.”

My QA team actually started holding Scrum meetings (see picture) about three months ago and it seems to help us stay more focused each day. What’s lacking is a formal sprint goal and means to track progress towards it. Bob Galen’s little session has convinced me it’s worth a try. At least to tide me over till all my devs implement Scrum!

Who am I?

My typical day: get up, maybe hit the gym, drop my kids off at daycare, listen to a podcast or public radio, do not drink coffee (I kicked it), test software or help others test it, break for lunch and a Euro-board game, try to improve the way we test, walk the dog and kids, enjoy a meal with Melissa, an IPA, and a movie/TV show, look forward to a weekend of hanging out with my daughter Josie, son Haakon, and perhaps a woodworking or woodturning project.